The East Pointers have become a beloved band in Sisters. photo by Cody Rheault

By Ceili Cornelius

The East Pointers returned to play the Sisters Folk Festival this year as the encore performer, after their lively performances at the 2016 festival.

Jake Charron, Koady Chaisson, Tim Chaisson and their sound engineer Donny Richard returned to Sisters for the Americana Song Academy at Caldera and the weekend folk festival.

"The festival is an instant highlight of the summer, we have so much fun playing it as well as teaching at camp, it's something very special to us," said banjoist Koady Chaisson.

Even with the cancellation of the festival, the East Pointers kept their spirits high by getting together with other artists and bringing people together with music.

"It was an incredible honor to be chosen as the repeat act and we are bummed we couldn't play for the audiences who wanted us to come back," said Chaisson.

All members love the fact that the town of Sisters really does become a stage.

"The vibe of Sisters is very much like the east coast of Canada where we are from, so we love coming here and feeling like home. Everyone here is incredibly friendly and understanding and so passionate about music, and it's a great place to be," said Chaisson.

Even with forest fires surrounding them, at song camp they were still able to hike around Caldera, located west of Sisters at Blue Lake.

"It's beautiful in it's own way - even with the forest fires," said Chaisson.

They aren't accustomed to seeing forest fires on Prince Edward Island where they are from; they see tropical storms.

"This was our first time really experiencing seeing forest fires firsthand," said Chaisson.

The East Pointers are considered "contemporary folk," but they don't put themselves in genre boxes. Chaisson describes their music as "upbeat, Celtic folk; we don't really play traditional music, but we have elements of it, we write all our own stuff and we just do what we do," said Chaisson.

The band has been touring consistently since Sisters Folk Festival last year. They've been all over the world, from the UK, to Spain to Australia.

"We discover new things and new places every time we go to a new place - we try to experience as much as we can," said Chaisson.

They are in the process of releasing their latest album, "What We Leave Behind," which is out September 29. They have released two singles, "Tanglewood" and "82 Fires." They have included 82 Fires in their set for about a year. As Chaisson noted on their website: "While in Penguin, Tasmania we spoke with an older gentleman, a lifelong resident, who said that there were 82 wildfires currently on the loose in Tasmania, the most in over half a century. It hit home the severity of what we were all experiencing. It was a restless few days for us. Small human decisions about where to live or whether or not the show would go on didn't matter. Mother Nature would always have the final say. Being in the middle of that brings an immediacy about it, you can feel powerless."

82 Fires is a relevant song to Sisters' summer and the status of the number of fires burning across the state.

"The song is eerily relevant to what is going on here and the question of the show going on or not," said Chaisson. "Many of the old-growth forests burned down (in Tasmania), and they have six to seven years' worth of fires in one summer."

"Tanglewood" is one they have never performed live. Jake Charron and Koady Chaisson wrote the song.

"We start it as a slow ease into our progressed sound on this album, and then we speed it up in the same key, and then had a key change. We wanted to give audiences a glimpse of what this record would sound like because it is loads different than our previous Secret Victory," said Chaisson. "We added a lot of new and different sounds, we have Jake Charron playing the keys for us, and we have more songs that we recorded and are excited to start playing."

The East Pointers will be on the road for many more months after their album release. They will be going to the UK, Australia, New Zealand, India and back to Canada and the U.S. in

2018.

"We hope to return to Sisters soon and play for the festival again when it actually happens, and we were honored to be chosen to come back," said Chaisson.

They did manage to play a set in a pop-up concert at The Belfry over the weekend, living up to their dance-band reputation.

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